Atlanta signed Marcell Ozuna to a four-year deal last Friday, reuniting the power-hitting outfielder with the Braves after a 2020 season where he led Major League Baseball with 18 home runs and drove in 56 runs, all while hitting .338 with an OPS of 1.067 in a shortened 60-game season.
Fans rejoiced, but also asked what took so long.
Braves general manager Alex Anthopoulos joined Dukes & Bell Monday and discussed the back and forth of getting Ozuna's deal done.
"Probably the best way to put this is for anyone out there who has sold a house before," Anthopoulos shared an analogy. "You put your house up on the market and you get an offer on the first day you might be thinking ‘Am I going to do better? It’s a little early, I might have to wait.’ I do think the fact that Marcell took the one-year deal a year ago, he had a fantastic year. He bet on himself. I felt it was important for him to test the market to see how it went, to get a feel for it.
"I think it’s tough to do a deal early. He was open to it, we were open to it as well. The thing is, he’s not the one doing the negotiations he hires some people to do it. We needed time for them to go through the process and to get a feel for what the market was going to be. At the same time, we were pretty confident he was going to come back to us at the end. It was very clear that we were his first choice."
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The four-year contract is worth $65 million, according to the salary website Spotrac. It has an average annual payout of $16.25 million. But that final figure might have looked different had Ozuna and the Braves inked a deal earlier.
"We knew we wanted to sign him back, we just had a sense that this was a deal that wasn’t going to get done early," said the Braves GM. "As much as Marcell said “Hey, why don’t we do it early?’ Which was awesome. It was funny. Put me on the spot. I don’t think he was taking this exact deal the first day of free agency. He may have."
A number of teams were linked to Ozuna in free-agency rumors. And MLB's indecisive dance with a universal DH likely slowed these negotiations as well. But now the big bat the Braves needed has been added. Ozuna can slide into Atlanta's cleanup spot and protect NL MVP Freddie Freeman, and help this team keep pace with World Series champs, Los Angeles, and hold off a very active New York Mets team that's pushing to gain ground in the division.
